(paper given at the
Workshop on the Flemish Long-Term Vision of Nature
Conservation in Urban and Suburban areas - Brussels 7 Nov
2000)

The European Research
Network - Greenstructure and Urban planning

Since 1991 a group of
practitioners and researchers have been working together on
the issues relating to the role of "nature" and more
generally "greenspace" in cities. In particular, we have
been interested in how a city's greenspaces could be used to
enhance the environmental sustainability of urban areas.

The emphasis of our
common research has shifted over time:

We began by
considering the role of urban greenspace in developing
ideas about ecologically
sound and sustainable urban
planning, which
of course inevitably encompassed the role of nature in
cities;

We then moved on to
an interest in the impact of
urban
densification on
a city's greenspace and its capacity to enhance the
environmental sustainability of a city;

Now our emphasis has
shifted to the mechanisms by which ideas about the
possible role of greenspaces in urban areas might be
incorporated into the land use and land management
planning processes - we are looking in particular at
Greenstructure
Planning (through
a COST Action funded by the EU - see diagram-COST 11 Map)
and at how ideas about greenspace and its functions can
be communicated between the professions involved and the
other "actors" - the public, the politicians, the
educators and the workforce who ultimately must implement
the ideas on the ground (through a research project
comparing five case studies in Houten, Cergy Pontoise,
Tampere, Gothenburg and Aarhus, funded by the EU -
GREENSCOM).

As our research
interests have become more focused on the link between
greenspace and urban form and spatial planning, so we have
taken to calling our group the European Research Network on
Greenstructure and Urban Planning (see diagram Network Map).
Over the decade that we have met together, membership of the
group has kept evolving to reflect the changing emphasis of
our research interests. Through the work of this group we
have begun to gain some understanding of how researchers and
practitioners in the different European countries are
tackling the investigation of the link between greenspace
(which includes remnants of natural habitats as well as
recently created naturalistic habitats), built form and
spatial planning.

In the main the members
of the group have been ecologists, landscape planners, urban
planners, architects, social geographers and experts in
planning and managing a city's open spaces and recreation
areas. We have also been joined when necessary by water
engineers, waste engineers and traffic engineers. The
multi-disciplinary nature of this group has been important
from the start: we recognised early on that many of the
problems we are identifying and many of the strategies we
are considering require the involvement of a whole range of
expertise. It has concerned us that the slow progress in
recognising the vital role that a city's greenspaces play in
enhancing a city's environmental sustainability has, to a
great measure, been due to the lack of any widespread
appreciation of how the knowledge and skills of each
profession have to interact with that of other disciplines
if effective solutions to enhancing urban environmental
sustainability are to be identified and
implemented.

One simple example of
this lack of communication between different professions
concerning urban greenspaces is that Grounds Maintenance
Teams continue to strive to produce neatly mown lawns
everywhere and do so by mowing the grass at great expense,
often as many as 13 times a year. At the same time, the same
city's ecologist is probably looking for areas of land to
extend the area of naturalistic long grass and herbs so as
to increase local biodiversity - a much cheaper solution for
any city, as such a land cover only needs cutting down once
a year.

Practices are changing
fast in many countries - as you will see from the good
practice examples presented later in this Workshop. There
are, however, many towns in those same countries where local
authority officials are still at a loss to decide what is
best done locally to enhance environmental sustainability -
evidence that information about best practice is not moving
around Europe fast enough. National policy and planning
guidance is too often vague, as are regional and local
planning statements. At the local level, the level where
things really happen on the ground, more and better guidance
is needed by Green Departments, town planners and city
engineers, as well as local politicians.

In every country within
our group, there are examples of national policies
containing statements in relation to nature in cities and
enhancing biodiversity. Similarly in all these countries
there are local planning documents stressing the importance
of applying such policies. But at the same time there is a
lack of a cohesive approach to greenspace in cities. Almost
without exception the policies and planning guidance deal
separately with "nature", public open space, recreation,
water management and the other issues which relate to how a
city uses its greenspaces. I believe that these policy
statements have been drawn up in this way mainly because it
is easier to deal with such issues individually, rather than
because of any intention to ignore the links between
them.

DEFINITIONS
OF TERMS

Before going further it
is essential to explain what I mean when I'm using certain
phrases. There is evidence of a great deal of confusion and
cross-purpose talking about the "green" in cities within the
literature, which in part at least stems from the different
interpretation we each put to the terminology. I have put
together some definitions which I hope will be helpful- they
are of course open to debate and modification.

Greenspace- Greenspaces are "places" - areas of land with mainly
unsealed surfaces within and around the city - these
"places" carry human activity as well as plants, wildlife
and water and their presence influences quality of life, as
well as local air and water quality.

See Greenspace Diagram -
this diagram differentiates the Formal Provision of Open
Space in a city (that which appears on planning documents
and in England would be called Public Open Space) from
Actual Greenspaces, which are often far greater in area. The
latter is the land which is composed of unsealed surface
(not covered by buildings or paved surfaces) and so has the
capability to support plants and therefore wildlife. It is
the total Formal Provision plus other Actual Greenspace that
forms a city's greenstructure (see Stocksbridge and
Broomhall Maps). It is only when a city's greenspaces are
considered together as a unity composed of many different
spaces with varying "green" characteristics, that the
planning process can begin to identify local appropriate
actions towards a more sustainable way of coping with nature
in cities, water management and waste management, as well as
the experiential aspects of human life in cities. Greenspace
is of essence multi-functional.

For instance:

- through the flora
and fauna they support, greenspaces are crucial to the
survival of any level of biodiversity across a
city;

- greenspaces have a
measurable impact on local as well as city-wide air
quality and can ameliorate the temperature within a
city;

- by providing
"natural" places through which water runs and within
which it can be stored, greenspaces can have an impact on
water quality and on the management of surface flows and,
therefore, on the reduction of local flood
hazard;

Therefore it can be
argued that greenspaces are essential to the maintenance and
enhancement of the quality of life in all urban areas. They
cannot be neglected, nor can they be eradicated without
profound long-term damage to the potential quality of human
life in urban areas and their immediate surroundings - a
factor not yet recognised by the planning process. The way
in which a city's greenspaces are managed in the built up
urban area and how these link through suburbia into the
surrounding rural landscapes is a vital topic for the
planning process, as cities are not islands which can be
dealt with in isolation - rather they create economic,
social and environmental "footprints" which extend into
their immediate hinterland and often far beyond.

Greenstructure
- This word is
not used in the UK, French or Italian planning systems.
Where it is used in northern European countries it can have
differing meanings in different countries - sometimes
referring only to linking that part of a city's land area
which is Formal Open Space and the City Fringe so as to form
greenways.

The word greenstructure
is now used by our group to allow the development of
concepts relating to the role of a city's greenspaces in the
planning, designing and management of urban areas. The word
is taken to encompasses the linking together of greenspaces
and to signify that the spaces involved have the potential
to support "nature in the city".

There is a noticeable
lack of planning theory in relation to the overall role of
greenspace in cities; instead only specific greenspaces with
specific attributes have been considered as worth mentioning
(i.e. public parks, historic urban gardens, recreational
open spaces and ecologically valuable sites). This has led
to the "island" approach to both Parks and Nature Areas -
each element is seen in isolation, a factor that has been
disastrous for many natural habitats in cities. When the
so-called "ecologically valueless" spaces around the
designated "valuable habitats" have been built over, or had
their drainage changed, or their vegetation removed, the
area of land subject to preservation has deteriorated, often
beyond repair. In contrast, our concept of greenstructure
recognises the interaction that must exist between all
greenspaces if biodiversity is to be preserved and enhanced.
I take greenstructure to be concerned with the
organisational aspects of a city's greenspaces - how such
spaces are best conserved, extended, planned, designed or
redesigned and how they should be managed in relation to the
other land uses of a city.

Greenstructure
Planning- The concept of Greenstructure Planning has been
adopted in some northern European countries (notably Norway
and the Netherlands) as a means of linking consideration of
the quality of life in the present day city to the presence
or absence of greenspaces and the special and varying
qualities of such spaces. Greenstructure Planning is
proposed as a mechanism which could deal with how a city's
greenspaces might be planned in a spatial sense, and then
how they might best be designed, managed and maintained for
the benefit of the local population.

A properly functioning
urban greenstructure is as important to the quality of life
of urban dwellers as a city's infrastructure and needs to be
recognised as such by the planning system.

Some
examples of aspects of Greenstructure Planning in several
European Countries

During the past decade
our group has noticed an increased understanding in how a
city's greenspaces can be used in multi-functional ways to
manage water, increase levels of biodiversity, improve air
quality, reduce windspeed, grow biomass and even to grow
fresh "organic" food. There has also been evidence of a
growing realisation that developing this multi-functional
use of greenspaces creates a much richer range of
"experiences" for local inhabitants, including the
possibility of more diverse local recreational activities.
However, only in the Scandinavian countries, and in Germany
and Holland has this understanding begun to be translated
into developing Greenstructure Planning as part of the
official City Planning System. Even then, what
"Greenstructure Planning" is taken to mean, varies from
country to country, although in all cases implicit in the
term is planning for the conservation of any existing
"nature areas" and the enhancement of
biodiversity.

In Norway and Sweden the
national government level has progressed further than others
by putting Greenstructure Planning on a par with
Infrastructure Planning within urban areas. This is a very
interesting development for those of us struggling to
explain the value of developing an approach to
Greenstructure Planning to our own officials.

Breda

There are other speakers
here from the Netherlands who know far more than I do about
developments there, but one of the earliest examples I came
across of Greenstructure Planning was the work done by the
"Green" Department in Breda in the early 1980s. There the
staff of the Green Department tried to show how a
restructuring of the greenspaces could save the city money,
while solving some local environmental problems and creating
a wider range of naturalistic habitats. I understand that
the ideas were enthusiastically accepted by the city
planners until it was realised that adopting such an
approach would eventually mean that the greenstructure
determined the urban form. Many people involved in the Breda
experiment went on to work in Wageningen at the research
unit which has now become known as Alterra - they continued
developing those initial ideas about urban nature and the
links with water, traffic and built form
planning.

Munich

You will be hearing
later about the very impressive work done in the Emmscher
area of Germany, but there is another piece of work in that
country which it is well worth your investigating - that is
the "urban nature" study of the City of Munich undertaken by
the late Fritz Duhme and his colleague Stephan Pauleit at
the TUMünchen. In the late 1980s they undertook a
detailed ecological study of all the unsealed surfaces
within city - that is the land surface most likely to carry
vegetation and therefore to support a range of wildlife.
They mapped this data in GIS and analysed it to show the
full range of habitats occurring within the urban area and
its immediate surrounds. They went beyond that survey and
proposed which areas of land should be preserved in their
present state for ecological reasons and which might be
enhanced for the benefit of the local people's recreational
and other requirements. As you can imagine the availability
of such data was seen by some as political dynamite - who
were these ecologists and landscape planners to suggest what
the planners and politicians should do!

Ringkøbing

The research undertaken
by the Danish Building Research Institute went beyond a
similar detailed survey of the local ecology, which included
all unsealed surfaces, not just the formally designated open
spaces, by adding an investigation of local surface and
storm water management, waste management and local energy
production, as well as the processes by which greenspaces
were maintained.

The analysis of the data
has provided a wealth of information about greenspaces in a
small northern city - more detailed than any other study, in
my view. For instance, there is data on the link between
both density and the age of development and the area of
unsealed surface, as well as on the percentage of that land
which is vegetated and the type of vegetation.

The study identified a
need for a strategic approach to planning greenspace and the
need for such an approach to deal with all the town's
greenspaces, not just the official open spaces. For
instance, a major part of the town's surface area was in the
ownership of institutions or industry and these vast areas
were ecological deserts, although they had the potential to
be changed through habitat creation into a very special
feature for the town.

Sheffield

In Sheffield there is no
Greenstructure Plan. There are, however, several research
projects underway relating to nature in the city and
greenspace. As with all English cities there is an excellent
set of data on the "valuable natural habitats" and these are
all protected in the local plans. The problem for Sheffield
is the sheer quantity of greenspace (see Sheffield
Greenspace Map), due in part to local topographic
characteristics. Sheffield is the city with the most Public
Open Space per inhabitant in the UK, if not Europe (see
Diagram of Sheffield Land use). Inevitably there are
pressures from developers to be allowed to use some of what
they see as surplus greenspace for housing and industry. The
city cannot afford to maintain this land adequately. That
plus the money the city could make by selling the land to
off-set the enormous debts built up during the recessions of
the 1980s and 1990s when its heavy industry collapsed, is
creating pressure for a more holistic approach to
greenspaces.

The greenspace research
projects underway at present include a detailed study of
Stocksbridge
(large file - long download),
a suburban township within the city boundaries, a study of a
late Victorian suburb which has been the subject of
continuous densification over the last four decades, and
another study of the capacity of the domestic garden to
support biodiversity.

Although we do not have
any Greenstructure Planning mechanism in England, we do have
some examples of towns which have used the idea of "nature
in the city" to develop and implement long-term strategies
for environmental enhancement of their open space system
(Leicester and Kirklees are particularly well known). Other
speakers will give you details of this approach later today.
There has also been some large scale landscape planning of
parks and gardens in the London area - to hear about that it
is suggested that you should contact Tom Turner at Greenwich
University.

There are many other
research projects which might be of interest to your group
and I suggest you keep visiting our website, as it is
frequently updated: